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This part of BPMS series is focused on developer’s interaction with BPMS system, design tools, etc. It describes subjective experiences with ActiveVOS designer version 6.1. At the time of writing this article ActiveVOS v. 9 was announced. I believe that a lot of stuff described in this article were enhanced and the product has made a great step ahead. Here are some key points which were recognized as limitation.

Mitigate your expectation regarding BPMS designer IDE. Designer is Eclipse based IDE so for those who is familiar with Eclipse shouldn’t be a problem to start work with. Just expect that not all features are fully elaborated like code completion is completely missing. Xpath, Xquery error highlighting, code formating (even tab ident is completely missing). Message transformation can be really painful from that point of view. It is good that these problems were at least partially addressed in future releases.

Team collaboration is a bit difficult. Not because of missing integration to a version control systems like SVN, CVS, etc. But just simply because of generated artefacts like deployment descriptors (pdd files), ant scripts they all contain absolute paths to files. What simply doesn’t work on different PC. Fortunately this problem is easy to avoid by replacing this absolute path by relative ones.

Be prepared that some product feature are not reliable or doesn’t work. As nobody is perfect even ActiveVOS BPMS is not an exception. Just name those which we have to cope with:

eventing – On Weblogic application server running in cluster this feature were not reliable.